Mr Dassin's Hollywood career was cut short when he was blacklisted American film director Jules Dassin has died in an Athens hospital after a short illness, at the age of 96.

Blacklisted in Hollywood after WWII, he went to Europe where he married the late Greek actress and later culture minister Melina Mercouri.

She starred in Mr Dassin's most famous film, Never on Sunday.

After her death in 1994, Mr Dassin fought to realise her main goal: the return of the Parthenon, or Elgin, marbles from Britain to Greece.

A spokesman for Hygeia hospital in Athens said Mr Dassin had been admitted for treatment two weeks ago.

"Greece grieves the loss of a rare human being, an important creator and a true friend," Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis said in a statement.

Oscar nominations

Mr Dassin was born in the US state of Connecticut on 18 December 1911.

He worked as an actor and theatre producer before becoming an assistant to film director Alfred Hitchcock.

He was active in leftist politics and in the early 1950s his promising Hollywood career was cut short when he was named as a communist and blacklisted.

Dassin and Mercouri campaigned for the return of the Elgin marbles

He met Ms Mercouri at the Cannes Film Festival in 1955 where he won the best director prize for his film Rififi. Its long heist sequence, without dialogue, became a template for many later crime capers.

He directed his wife in seven films, including 1960's Never on Sunday in which she played a prostitute with a heart of gold. He received Oscar nominations for best director and screenplay.

Mr Dassin stopped making films in 1980 after Circle of Two starring Richard Burton performed poorly at the box office.

Ms Mercouri was elected to the Greek parliament in 1974 and in 1981 the newly-elected socialist government appointed her culture minister.

After his wife's death he created the Melina Mercouri Foundation to continue her campaign to have the 2,500-year-old marbles that were stripped from the Parthenon returned to Greece.

"He will be remembered for all his good work and struggles with Melina for his campaign for the return of the marbles, which will continue," said socialist opposition leader George Papandreou.

Very sad to see how the McCarthyism politics of that time ruined a film career in the U.S. Look at the impact he had regardless. At least he was accepted in Europe; but how sad that he just quit due to one poor, box-office showing. I wish he'd lived to see the return of the marbles and I hope that his and Melina's quest for that will ultimately be successful and that they'll be officially honoured in some way when it happens.

I don't know... if there wasn't McCarthyism, he would never met Melina and make his European movies.

Another expatriot, Joseph Losey, who emigrated to Europe and made modernistic masterpieces with Harold Pinter in UK (Accident, The Servant, and that film we talked much about few years back, The Go-Between), and then in France (Les routes du sud; Mr. Klein) and Italy (Don Giovanni, just released on DVD), said once that he is not sorry, that he's even thankful for being blacklisted, otherwise he would probably be making money in Hollywood, while this way he was making the films as he wanted. "That was the best thing that could happen to me."

I think another reason that Dassin didn’t want to talk about the blacklist was to avoid being defined by it. He recognized, exile or no, that he did get to make quite a few movies and that they were damn good.

An interesting article about "Fugitive Pieces"(2007), filmed on Hydra (and also Kefallonia, Lesvos and Canada),based on Anne Michaels' novel and directed by Jeremy Podeswa:

Hydra is probably on thousands of lists of “Places to Visit Before You Die.” The 21-square-mile Greek island rises steeply out of the Aegean Sea to a focal point, the 2,000-foot summit of Mount Ere. The principal town, situated on a crescent-shaped cove, is made up of whitewashed houses and tavernas, all topped with terra cotta–tiled roofs. Locals fish for sponges and build boats, minor vestiges of a major maritime trading tradition. In the past 50 years, an artists’ colony has sprung up there, attracting the likes of author Henry Miller (Hydra has “a wild and naked perfection”) and poet-songwriter Leonard Cohen (“the wind brings you the sound...three young men, their arms about each other’s shoulders, singing magnificent close harmony”).

Around 2003, movie and television director Jeremy Podeswa also went there on an artistic pilgrimage, as he puzzled out how to make a film of Anne Michaels’ 1996 book, Fugitive Pieces, some of which is set on Hydra (or Idhra, as it’s also known). “I wanted the place to inspire me,” he says animatedly, “to really understand why she had set [part of] the book there.” Despite a dearth of roads on the remote island, he decided he’d have to shoot there. And when Podeswa wants something badly enough, he’ll do almost anything to get it. Even if it takes years.

And so, for a month in the spring of 2006, an international crew and cast, summoned at great expense, converged on Hydra to shoot a segment of Fugitive Pieces. “The set deck, the props, the lighting, the cameras all had to be carried by hand or donkey all the way up a big hill,” Podeswa recalls. “There were all these donkeys weighed down with the Panavision equipment.” It was an ambitious shoot to be sure, which was in keeping with the overall ambition of the film’s director and the scope of his latest project.

The film is a joint Canadian/Greek production and was shot in both countries. It sounds like the logistics of production were very complex. Do you have any stories that particularly sum up for you what that was like?

The most dramatic one is that we were shooting on an island in Greece called Hydra, which is an incredibly beautiful island but not really one suitable for filmmaking. There’re no roads, so there’re no cars, no trucks, no vehicles of any kind and because everything is up on hillsides, you can’t even roll things anywhere; you have to climb.

We had Panavision cameras strapped to donkeys, people carrying furniture on their backs and climbing thousands of stairs, and that’s how we made the movie. Because it was so crazy an endeavour, it was also fantastic. It was such a bonding experience for everyone making the movie. We were shooting in a place that hasn’t really been shot before that way. It is singularly beautiful and for the story works incredibly well. Jacob is a writer who goes to Greece to heal, and this is exactly the kind of place that Jacob would go to. He wouldn’t go to a place where there are scooters buzzing around; he would go to a place that is remote and beautiful and quiet and has an unbelievable beauty and that’s what Hydra has.

...Jacob is a writer who goes to Greece to heal, and this is exactly the kind of place that Jacob would go to. He wouldn’t go to a place where there are scooters buzzing around; he would go to a place that is remote and beautiful and quiet and has an unbelievable beauty and that’s what Hydra has.

Sophia

Indeed, I'm sure all we Hydra appreciators can relate to this sentiment about what's good for Jacob?!

Cheers Andrew (Darby)

'I cannot give the reasons
I only sing the tunes
The sadness of the seasons
The madness of the moons'
~ Mervyn Peake ~